Five Points to Consider for Live Chat

Written By: Dave Campbell | Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2013

Live chat usage continues to grow year after year by companies across all verticals across the globe. The effectiveness of this real-time communication channel makes it a smart choice for businesses while providing an engaging experience to web visitors. If your company doesn’t offer live chat today and is looking to expand into this medium, you may not know where to start.

Here are five points that we recommend considering when building your live chat business plan:

Who is your target audience? – Depending on your business, you may decide to target your web traffic for sales-related chats or use chat as a support tool. You may even decide to do both. Knowing who you want to chat with and what the conversations will be based on will help establish goals.

What are your goals? – From increasing average order values and lead acquisition rates through sales chats or increasing the utilization of agents handling multiple engagements, there are a variety of reasons to consider.

Who is going to be answering chat? – Whether you have army of one or a call center of many, who staffs your chats is one of the most critical pieces to ensure a positive chat experience for your site visitors.

Where are you going to place chat? – Visibility of chat on your site is key to its success. Keeping your goals in mind, you will want to consider how you use chat in areas such as the shopping cart or support pages and where chat button placement works best.

What is the cost of not doing chat? – From missed revenue opportunities to being a competitive differentiator, there is a hidden cost of not providing chat on your site that may be greater than you think.

As you start to build your live chat business plan, we hope these considerations give you the necessary guidance to begin taking action. If you have questions as you begin, the BoldChat team would be happy to help. Call us at 866-753-9933 or email us.